Palo Alto Networks continues to lead the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Network Firewalls
We’re pleased to announce that Palo Alto Networks have continued to be ‘up and to the right’ in 2019’s Gartner Magic Quadrant for Network Firewalls.
With firewall providers embedding multiple security features in firewalls and enabling integration and automation capabilities with other security products, firewalls are evolving into network security platforms.
Positioned as a leader in the Network Firewall market for the eight time in a row, the report dives into the evolving industry trends and how Palo Alto Networks continues to tackle these challenges with best-in-class solutions.
Palo Alto Networks
Santa Clara-based Palo Alto Networks is a large security vendor with more than 5,800 global employees, shipping firewalls since 2007. In addition to enterprise firewall physical and virtual appliances, the vendor’s products include EDR software, threat intelligence, SaaS security, cloud compliance and policy management tools, and security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR). The vendor has delivered integrations between its offerings as a security operating platform, managing it from its Panorama management console. Palo Alto Networks has made use of its Cortex offering to build out its third-party ecosystem, enabling partners to build applications that interact with the Palo Alto Networks platform.
Palo Alto Networks firewalls continue to lead the firewall market share, showing strong revenue growth. Its firewalls have the most visibility on firewall shortlists in Gartner client inquiries. Introduction of Prisma Access and the Prisma cloud offering show the vendor’s growing focus on cloud services.
Company news includes the acquisition of Twistlock, a container security technology, and PureSec, a serverless security solution. In addition, the vendor has recently repackaged its cloud security solutions under the name Prisma and its offering of solutions for security operations under the name Cortex.
During 1H19, Palo Alto Networks released its 9.0 version, introducing DNS Security Service. As part of this release, it also introduced a series of line cards for its PA-7000 line of appliances, in hopes of increasing throughputs with security protections enabled.
Strengths
Sales Strategy: Gartner has noted an increasing number of Palo Alto Networks firewalls being bought under the vendor’s ELA contract as part of a larger security platform play. Some Gartner clients express interest in using the Panorama management platform as the orchestration point for the vendor’s integrated solutions. Surveyed customers and resellers value the platform approach.
Offering: Palo Alto Networks is the first hardware-based firewall vendor offering direct FWaaS as a SaaS model. Its Prisma Access FWaaS offers outbound filtering capabilities. Gartner has seen some positive adoption of the product for branch offices and roaming user use cases.
Sales Strategy: Customers report that more of their Palo Alto Networks spend is on subscriptions rather than hardware, making security budgeting more predictable. Surveyed customers rated Palo Alto Networks’ firewall as one of the most likely firewalls they were considering renewing without conducting a competitive evaluation.
Product Execution: In 1H19, Gartner clients reported improved SSL decryption performance. If this improvement continues, the enhanced capability, plus the line cards introduced for the PA-7000 Series to improve performance, will make Palo Alto Networks more suitable for large-scale data center deployments.
Product Strategy: The Twistlock and PureSec acquisitions demonstrate a vision of anticipating customers’ mid- to long-term needs as they construct new workloads using microservices and serverless environments. Palo Alto Networks is building a very broad cloud ecosystem, announcing new public cloud support for Alibaba Cloud and Oracle Cloud, and for private cloud/SDN and hybrid use cases, with support for Cisco Enterprise Network Compute System (ENCS), VMware Cloud for AWS and NSX, and Nutanix.
Client Feedback: Surveyed firewall respondents list Palo Alto Networks as the vendor they most often evaluate. This tracks with Gartner client inquiries, as Palo Alto Networks is the vendor most visible on client shortlists.
Customer Experience: Gartner clients have highly rated the vendor’s presales team making the evaluation period smoother. They cite its presales services as being highly professional in terms of offering quality of support during the evaluation period irrespective of the size of the deal — something they indicate other competitors lack.
Cautions
Pricing: Even with improved price/performance ratios at the branch office, price is frequently cited by Gartner clients as a reason not to select Palo Alto Networks. The chassis-based data center firewalls (PA-7050 and PA-7080) are called out as being very expensive compared to other solutions.
Product Strategy: As the vendor continues to expand its product portfolio by acquiring early-stage security technologies. Gartner observes that these are sometimes released to customers before reaching maturity, leading to early customer dissatisfaction. Before purchasing these new products, Gartner recommends that clients carefully evaluate the capabilities of new product acquisitions to ensure that they can fulfill their requirements.
Execution: Palo Alto Networks came to market with a tightly engineered firewall, which was also evident in early product acquisitions such as Cyvera (endpoint traps) and Morta Security (integrated into WildFire). However, the increasing pace of acquisitions over the past few years has resulted in loosely federated components without the same level of integration seen previously. This is evident in recent acquisitions such as Evident.io, RedLock, CirroSecure (now Prisma SaaS), Demisto, Secdo and LightCyber which were branded as stand-alone product lines and recently repackaged under the Prisma and Cortex offerings .
Product Strategy: Gartner clients and surveyed customers and partners continue to note that early versions after a major software release have bugs and are not production-ready. Very large releases require more time to stabilize.
Product Execution: Gartner clients note performance issues within public cloud environments. Some cite the necessity of deploying high-availability (HA) pairs of virtual firewalls in IaaS cloud, thus increasing costs and the solution’s operational footprint, and adding to a less-than-smooth deployment experience on the public cloud.
Feature: Palo Alto Networks firewalls lack an integrated SD-WAN feature and offer it through partnerships with third-party vendors. The vendor also lacks a cloud-based management portal offered as a SaaS model.
Customer Feedback: Surveyed clients have indicated a decline in the quality of technical support, with the growing number of customers in the vendor’s installed base.
A cornerstone partner within our cybersecurity practice, we enjoy a deep understanding of their technologies and deploy high-performance security platforms that adapt to each client’s evolving security posture.
You can download the document directly from Palo Alto Network’s website should you wish to review the full report.